Partisan, and Proud of It

Riding a tea-party wave, the Republicans first elected to Congress in 2010 were determined to shake up Washington. They did.

By

Jonathan Karl

Updated April 23, 2012 6:39 p.m. ET

In July 2011, when news first leaked that President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were secretly negotiating a "grand bargain" of entitlement cuts and tax increases, top Democrats in Congress thought that Mr. Obama had lost his mind. After all, the Democratic playbook for winning back control of Congress was to vilify Republicans for their plan, enshrined in Rep. Paul Ryan's budget, to control the cost of Medicare. That the president was willing even to talk about making cuts to the program seemed to threaten the Democrats' No. 1 campaign issue.

A rescue operation was soon under way. In "Do Not Ask What Good We Do," Robert Draper vividly describes a closed-door caucus meeting of House Democrats just after the world learned about Mr. Obama's secret talks with Mr. Boehner. Nancy Pelosi prepared her fellow House Democrats to go to battle against the president. She told them she would deliver the message directly to the White House the next day. "Do I have your permission," Ms. Pelosi, her voice rising, asked her fellow Democrats, "to go over there and say, 'We're not cutting Medicare, we're not cutting Social Security?' " The party rank-and-file "applauded wildly," Mr. Draper says. "She had no intention of letting Obama hand the Democrats' winning formula over to Boehner as a sacrificial offering."

It has become conventional wisdom to say that House Republicans, led by hard-line freshmen, killed any chance of a grand bargain by refusing to consider tax increases. Mr. Draper's vignette suggests that House Democrats also stood ready to drive a stake through the heart of the grand bargain. As it turned out, the whole idea died before either Ms. Pelosi or the House Republicans had a chance to kill it.

A correspondent for GQ and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Mr. Draper embedded himself in the House in 2011, getting to know the key players—newcomers and old-timers alike. In his group portrait, he doesn't make any sweeping judgments about who is to blame for the failure of this Congress to address the country's long-term problems. But his refreshingly balanced account captures the drama of one of Congress's most combative and maddeningly frustrating years in memory.

ENLARGE

Do Not Ask What Good We Do

By Robert Draper (Free Press, 327 pages, $28)

From the start, Republican leaders worried that the freshman class—the largest class of Republican newcomers in the House in nearly a century—would be impossible to control. During an orientation meeting after the November 2010 elections, Republican pollster Frank Luntz told the new Republicans: "Your base is going to kill you if you vote to raise the debt ceiling." That vote would be nine months away, but a dead-serious Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican House leader, said to Mr. Luntz: "You've caused us a problem here." But of course many of these Republicans, riding a tea-party wave, were elected to shake up Washington, not follow leadership.

One of Mr. Draper's most compelling portraits is Rep. Allen West, a freshman from Florida and a retired Army officer who has gained attention, in part, because he is one of just two black congressional Republicans and because he has a penchant for saying outrageous things (most recently, that there are "78 to 81" communists in Congress). Mr. West is arguably the most influential member of the freshmen class, and Mr. Draper shows why.

Like many of his fellow freshman, Mr. West came to Congress with no intention of blindly following the standard playbook. Even before he was sworn in, he was giving Republican leaders heartburn. He went on "Meet the Press" as a congressman-elect and said he wanted to see spending cuts everywhere—including the Defense Department. That remark, Mr. Draper reports, prompted a call from Buck McKeon, the incoming Armed Services Committee chairman. He demanded to know how Mr. West, who wanted a seat on Mr. McKeon's committee. could suggest that the Pentagon's budget needed to be cut. "You're talking to a guy who has been on the ground," the freshman coolly replied. "There's waste and I know where the low hanging fruit is."

Mr. West didn't like it when Republican leaders frittered away their time with long congressional recesses and show votes on things like reaffirming "In God We Trust" as the official motto of the U.S. But when Congress pushed the federal government to the brink of default during the summer 2011 impasse over raising the debt limit, it was Mr. West, more than anybody else in Congress, who made it possible for Mr. Boehner to pass a bill averting disaster. Mr. West didn't like the bill—he wanted deeper spending cuts before agreeing to more borrowing—but he made the case for compromise. "I've been on the side of guys who won battles and also of the guys who lost battles," he said. "The guys who lost were the ones who sat around and tried to come up with the one hundred percent solution." In the end, 59 freshmen Republicans voted for the debt deal, and only 28 voted against it.

There's one significant error in Mr. Draper's otherwise solid account. In the discussion of political gamesmanship over Medicare, Mr. Draper writes: "Only thirteen Republicans supported the new entitlement in 1965. Then and later, Medicare was anathema to market-based conservative orthodoxy." In fact, 70 Republicans in the House voted for Medicare in 1965, along with 13 in the Senate, representing almost half of all Republicans then in Congress. In contrast to the vote on President Obama's health-care bill—which passed without a single Republican vote—Medicare passed with a bipartisan majority.

You don't see many broadly bipartisan votes anymore on matters bigger than naming post offices. Is such intransigence always ineffective? The new Republican Congress forced a Democrat Senate and president (and big-spending Republicans) to cut some spending. More important, they changed the debate from "How much can we spend?" to "How much can we cut?" and even eliminated earmarks, the pork-barrel mechanism that flourished in the last Republican Congress. As those freshman Republicans campaign for the right to become sophomores, few of them think they've done enough, and even fewer feel any need to moderate their views.

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